Throughout the prewar years, Dr. Shiro Tashiro ranked among the most renowned Americans. In a sign of his prominence as author and educator, he was included in the Who’s Who in America directory in 1936-1937, the only Japanese American to be so honored. His research was in contention for the Nobel Prize in different fields. Yet following the outbreak of the Pacific War, Shiro Tashiro became an enemy alien, and was thereby restricted in his movements and finances. He may have felt himself under particular suspicion due to his prewar advocacy of friendship between the United States and Japan. Perhaps as a result, he expressed strong support for the United States after Pearl Harbor.
The struggle with Japan “may be a hard war,” he told one newspaper, but he was “confident of American victory.” Tashiro declared Japan “could have done nothing worse” than enter into the war, adding: “My studies have not been in the field of international politics, but it seems to me the military clique in Japan has seized the power and its terrible act makes it easier for me to feel as I do—giving my whole-hearted support to the United States.”
He proclaimed to the Cincinnati Enquirer that he regarded himself as American in spirit, explaining that he had lived more years in the United States than in Japan. “All my happiness, all my family, all my reputation are in the United States, and all my allegiance is to this country.” He added that he wished to become an American citizen and had repeatedly applied, but had been refused because his Japanese birth made him legally ineligible. Nevertheless, his American-born wife and children were all citizens. (In fact, Shizuka Tashiro had been stripped of her U.S. citizenship under the Cable Act after marrying her alien husband in 1915, and had only regained it through naturalization in 1940.)
He volunteered to aid the US war effort by lecturing on Japanese language. In 1943, he began teaching a second-semester Japanese class at Cincinnati Evening College—the first-ever course in Japanese language offered at University of Cincinnati. It was attended by a diverse population of students (both white and African American), local businessmen, and several army officers based nearby. Tashiro proposed to teach his students the entire Japanese alphabet plus about 500 Chinese characters, which would allow students to read and write simple Japanese sentences and give them some conversational ability.
Cincinnati Post reporter Noreen Freeman, who attended the first class, reported that Tashiro started the class by writing a Japanese sentence on the blackboard, which he then translated as “Next Christmas in Tokyo.” Freeman noted that Dr. Tashiro joked about the class roll as well.
“I am supposed to call the roll each time,” he said, “and next time, I shall say, after each of your names, ‘san.’ It is a title, like ‘Mr.’ or ‘Miss,’ but it comes after instead of before-like ‘Stevens san,’ for example. And when you address me, you will say, ‘Tashiro san.’ When you answer to your name, you will say, ‘Hai.’ (pronounced ‘Hi’). If anyone says ‘present’ next Thursday night, I put black mark.”
Tashiro’s teaching, and the work of the students who learned from him, drew approving commentary from the Cincinnati Post editorial writer “Cincinnatus,” who stated that it was useful to learn the enemy’s language:
Cincinnatus marks an advance in local civilization as he reads of the large class of citizens who, of evenings, are going to the University of Cincinnati to learn the language of the Japanese under the Japanese bio-chemist, Prof. Tashiro. What Cincinnatus likes especially is the respect that continues here for Dr. Tashiro, the Japanese, who has been at the university these many years and keeps on enjoying the esteem he deserves. During the last war old German teachers were driven from our schools.
The class proved so popular that Tashiro was obliged to divide it into three sections. He again offered the class in fall 1943.
Beyond teaching, Tashiro found ways to make himself useful through his fluency in Japanese. In October 1942, during the Battle of Guadalcanal, John Watkins, Master of Ceremonies of the “Soldiers’ Serenade” program broadcast on Station WCKY, received a letter from one Donald E. McCafferty, a U. S. Marine Corps Lieutenant stationed in Guadalcanal, praising the program. Watkins brought the letter to Shiro Tashiro, who analyzed it and discovered that the paper on which the letter as written was Japanese. Tashiro pointed out the noticeable water-mark on the paper and identified it as official stationery used by the Japanese “sea-army” service.
Similarly, in fall 1943 a four-page folder, written in Japanese and illustrated with a pagoda, was sent by a soldier in Alaska to a student at the University, who was unable to decipher it and feared that it might be Japanese propaganda. Acting Dean Frank R. Neuffer called in Tashiro, who solved the great mystery. Tashiro explained that the brochure was prepared by the U.S. War Department to be circulated among Japanese soldiers and contained excerpts from speeches by the Japanese emperor in 1938 and 1940 in which he expressed a desire for peace. It charged that Japanese military leaders had betrayed their emperor and people.
In August 1945, the time of the atomic bombing of his homeland, Tashiro defended the American action as legitimate. In a radio interview, he stated that the atomic bomb had nothing to do with the Japanese proposal of surrender. Instead, he said the Japanese, knowing they had lost the war, took the only opening they had—the lack of mention of the emperor in the Potsdam offer—to negotiate terms. He predicted a wave of suicide among the Japanese if their emperor were to be removed or killed.
Shortly afterwards, he granted an interview on the psychology of the Japanese that was published in the fashion magazine Vogue. In the interview, he explained that, just as the principles of democracy and Christianity were necessary to understand America, Japanese society could only be understood in reference to the family—the greatest moral and disciplinary force in society—as well as to ancestor worship (essential to the state religion of Shintoism) and inexactness. Tashiro asserted that “directness is one of the worst social errors.” He explained the Japanese failure to send delegates to Manila to negotiate surrender. “To them it was not a trick, but merely a manifestation of this national trait.”
In the interview, Tashiro again warmly recommended keeping the Japanese emperor on his throne and retaining the imperial system, fearing that if he was dethroned and accused of war crimes, the Japanese people would descend into bloodshed and moral disintegration, thereby setting back the cause of world peace.
With the end of the war, Tashiro returned to teaching and research work. In 1946, he and Dr. M. M. Zinninger of the General Hospital co-published an article in the journal Archives of Surgery. In the article, the authors revealed that, according to a five-year study of cases of appendicitis at General, mortality was down by 25%. The authors credited the reduction to an educational program which stressed the need for immediate hospitalization at the first detection of symptoms.
In 1952, Shiro Tashiro retired from University of Cincinnati. By that time, he had become such a renowned scientist and public figure that, in the wake of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952, which opened citizenship rights to Japanese immigrants, he became the first Japanese to be admitted to American citizenship at the Cincinnati Immigration and Naturalization office. In response, Tashiro claimed that acquiring citizenship was “as great a thrill as when I first saw the Golden Gate 52 years ago.” The Cincinnati Enquirer hailed the granting of citizenship to Tashiro and other Japanese immigrants as the correcting a historic injustice. “It is an ironic commentary on the perversity of human affairs that it took a long and bitter war between Japan and the United States to bring about the correction of this defect of intolerance in our nationality laws.”
Shiro Tashiro died on June 12, 1963 in Cincinnati. Though his passing was overshadowed in the national news by the assassination of civil rights leader Medgar Evers the same day, it was recorded in the local maintream press. In particular, Tashiro’s longtime colleague Gustav Eckstein published a fulsome tribute to him, “Shiro Tashiro: American Scientist,” in the Saturday Review.
© 2024 Greg Robinson
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